Episode 06 · The Commercial Excellence Podcast
From Exec to Coach with Ron Denoo
Ron Denoo · Former Global Head of Market Strategy Development, Mitsubishi Chemical Group
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What this episode covers
- More than thirty years in chemicals, plastics and composites, from real engineering work through global research leadership to CEO of a German plastics company.
- Twelve years at Mitsubishi Chemical Group, moving from a business unit to a regional role to a global one, including a spell in M&A.
- What the life cost: family kept out of Japan, an office in Tokyo, around a hundred and twenty flights a year, and meetings at whatever hour the time zones dictated.
- The acquisition approval meeting scheduled for December 25th, and what it told him about how much say he had over his own calendar.
- Announcing the exit roughly two years early, so that leaving was a plan rather than a surprise.
- The first client: his previous employer, who still needed an acquisition closed and got it from a consultant instead of an employee.
- The second: an industry contact at another company with the same problems, who is now by far his largest client.
- Hitting a full year's consulting-income goal five weeks after retiring, with no website and no advertising.
- The problem he has now, which is turning work down rather than finding it.
- The guitar business that started as a way to spend downtime in Japan, and what it taught him about work that does not feel like work.
- Why a consultant gets a license an employee rarely has, and what drops off the plate along with the job title.
- The opening line he uses with a new client, and why it takes the chip off their shoulder.
- The watch joke, told to a business unit leader he had been warned about, and what it opened.
- His single piece of advice for an executive who is used to having the answer.
- Who not how: finding the person rather than working out the method.
- Why the community turned out to matter more than the content for people making this move.
In this episode
Ron Denoo spent more than thirty years as an executive in chemicals, plastics and composites: a mechanical engineer who did real engineering for the first few years, ran global research organizations, was CEO of a German plastics company, and spent his last twelve years at Mitsubishi Chemical Group, moving from a business unit to a regional role to a global one.
It was a good career and a difficult way to live. He kept his family out of Japan while his office was in Tokyo, averaged around a hundred and twenty flights a year, and took meetings at whatever hour the time zones demanded. The moment he names is an acquisition approval meeting scheduled for December 25th.
He retired in January and hit his annual consulting-income goal five weeks later, with no website and no advertising. This session, run for people considering the same move, covers how he left, where the first two clients came from, and the distinction he draws between arriving with answers and arriving with questions.
Questions this episode answers
Who is Ron Denoo?
A mechanical engineer by training who spent more than thirty years as an executive in chemicals, plastics and composites. He did engineering work for his first four or five years, ran global research organizations, was CEO of a German plastics company, and spent his last twelve years at Mitsubishi Chemical Group.
What did the Mitsubishi years look like?
Twelve years, starting inside one of the business units, then promoted into a regional role and finally into a global one. He also spent a period in M&A. His own verdict on the career is that it was a great one and he has no complaints about the opportunities he was given.
What did that life cost?
He made a conscious decision not to relocate his family to Japan while his office was in Tokyo, which meant around a hundred and twenty flights a year and meetings at whatever hour the time-zone difference dictated. He did that for many years before he started questioning it.
What was the moment that crystallized it?
An acquisition approval meeting scheduled for December twenty-fifth. His reaction was that the company did not care about his schedule or his lifestyle. Alongside it sits the count of important life events he missed for a meeting somewhere.
What did he conclude?
That life was too short to live that way, and that he should start looking for off-ramps that would give him more balance. The specific thing he wanted was control over his own calendar, which he describes as the single most important item.
Why is calendar control the thing he names?
Because in a senior role at a global company you have very little of it. Someone else schedules a meeting, a conference or a trade show, and your life reorganizes around an event you had no say in. That is a structural feature of the job rather than a scheduling failure.
How did the guitar business start?
As a way to spend downtime in Japan. He is a musician and started visiting secondhand guitar shops and flea markets, bringing vintage instruments home, until his wife pointed out there was a guitar in each room of the house. So he started selling them, because what he enjoyed was the hunt.
Did that turn into a business?
Fifty sold the first year and two hundred the next, at which point he concluded there was a business model in it. That was about twelve years ago and it is still going, now run mostly by a partner. He started a second guitar company with a partner shortly before retiring, and is launching another brand.
What did the guitar business teach him?
That work does not have to feel like work. It was work and it brought income and it was not stressful, because he genuinely enjoyed it. That is what started him thinking about how to spend more of his time on things he wanted to do rather than things he had to do.
How much notice did he give?
He started talking about leaving roughly two years before he left, so it surprised no one; they knew what his plan was. That is the piece of the sequence that makes everything after it possible.
Why does announcing early matter so much?
Because when the time came, there were projects he had been involved in that they still felt needed his attention. That conversation went: I am happy to keep supporting those, and I will do it as a consultant rather than as an employee. A surprise resignation forecloses that entirely.
Who was his first client?
His previous employer. He was supporting an acquisition, then was asked to take the lead and close it, which he did in July of that year. His own assessment is that he did not have to work very hard at that one, which is the point of how he left.
Where did the second client come from?
An industry connection. Someone he had worked with previously had moved to another company in the same industry and recognized that they had many of the same problems he had been solving at Mitsubishi. Once they heard he was leaving, they reached out. That client is now by far his largest.
How quickly did the practice reach his target?
He had a number in mind for annual consulting income and had worked it into his financial plan. He met it within five weeks of leaving. His framing of the result is that it has not been what he expected, it has been better.
What is his problem now?
Turning work down rather than finding it. He still has his own businesses to run, and his wife's reminder is that he did not retire in order to work more. The constraint has moved from demand to capacity, which is a different problem from the one most people making this move expect.
Did he build a website?
No, and no advertising either. What he has done is work his network. Both of the first two clients arrived through people who already knew what he was like to work with, which is the argument against front-loading effort into marketing infrastructure.
How does he keep overhead down?
By using freelancers rather than hiring. Legal work, design, marketing, ad management and marketplace operations all go out on a project basis. He launched his guitar businesses this way and treats it as advice for any small business owner, including a consultant: it saves time and keeps overhead very low.
What is the difference between being an employee and being a consultant?
As an employee you have to weigh the political impact of what you say. As a consultant you get a license to shake things up, to be direct and truthful in a kind way, because the client expects an outside-in view untainted by politics and by long history inside the company.
What else changes?
The overhead disappears. People management and the daily obligations of leading in a large organization consume a lot of time and energy without often creating results. Removing them lets you spend your time on the things that do.
Does less time mean less impact?
The opposite, in his experience. He spends less time on his largest client than he did on the business he used to run, and feels he is having more impact. He describes it as a kind of reach that is hard to get from inside a large organization.
What is the difference between consulting and coaching?
A consultant analyzes the situation and tells you what to do, and may execute part of it. A coach asks what you think needs to happen and then asks the questions that guide you to the answer. You do not do the work for people; you help them do it for themselves.
Is one of those better?
They solve different problems, and Ron has done both. Closing an acquisition for his former employer was a hired-gun engagement: they needed the specific experience and the deal closed. The transformation work is coaching, because the goal there is capability that stays after he leaves.
When is the hired-gun shape the right one?
When a company lacks the specific experience or the bandwidth and needs the work done. Jesse's example is someone who has stood up a supply chain center of excellence being brought into a company doing it from scratch: they need a read on the situation, a road map, and often the deliverables produced.
Why does coaching differentiate you commercially?
Because it is not what most firms sell. Plenty of people have bought consulting or sat through a project where a consultant was involved, and there is a real bias in many organizations against them. Arriving to build capability rather than to present a recommendation is a different proposition.
How does Ron open with a new client?
Within his first few sentences he says he is not there because he thinks he has all the answers for their company. He is there because they have a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge in their business, their products and their industry, and his job is to facilitate a discussion that extracts it and turns it into something actionable.
Why does that opening work?
Because it takes the chip off their shoulder. Few people want to be told what to do, and an incoming consultant is assumed to be there to do exactly that. Saying otherwise in the first minute changes what the room expects from the rest of the day.
Does he believe clients already have the answers?
Most of the time, yes. You are usually surrounded by expertise in those organizations. What they may not know is which lever to pull, which direction to run, or what good looks like in a particular area, and that is where outside experience combines with their in-house knowledge.
What is the watch story?
He was warned before a full-day workshop that a particular business unit leader was tough and hated consultants. At lunch that leader told him: somebody once said a consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is. Ron's reply was that this is untrue, because a consultant borrows your watch and charges you to tell you what time it is.
How did that land?
The leader laughed and said: that is why I know you are not a consultant. Ron treats it as an important moment because it built trust, and that leader has since engaged him for further work with his business unit.
Was the leader difficult?
Ron says no, and is careful about it. He did not find him difficult or anti-consulting at all. He found him quite open-minded, and attributes that to having approached him with questions rather than with answers.
What is his advice for an executive who is used to having the answer?
Be humble. He names it as the single strongest thing, against the instinct to push your expertise at people because that feels like how you get accepted and re-engaged. Prefer staying open, and understanding what they know rather than overwhelming them with what you know.
Does that mean keeping your expertise to yourself?
No. His point is about sequence. The opportunities to share what you know and what you have done will come naturally, and they arrive because you stayed open first. Leading with the expertise sets the wrong tone, and the tone determines what happens afterwards.
What is who not how?
A principle Ron credits to Dan Sullivan and built his own business plan around: rather than working out how to do everything yourself, find the person who has the expertise and the appetite for it, and bring them into the problem.
How does that apply to a solo consultant?
In the end you have to deliver what the client needs. Sometimes you have the recipe and sometimes you do not, and either way you want to remain their problem solver. Ron's example: asked whether a commercial academy could be run for supply chain, his honest answer is that he is not the person to do it, so the question becomes who is.
Should you only target small and midsize companies?
Jesse argues strongly against it. Enterprises have far more resource to apply to a problem, and the work involved is often about the same, so you can add a zero to the deal. Very few people have real enterprise experience, and the belief that large companies only want the big firms is a limiting one rather than a true one.
What is the most common mistake people make on the way out?
Starting only once they have been laid off. Ron's contrast is that he positioned his departure two years ahead and left on his own terms and on a high note, at the point where the company's question was what he was working on that no colleague could pick up. The power dynamic was reversed before he ever asked for anything.
What do people over-invest in?
The website and the polish. Jesse's version is that people who love the optimization avoid the fundamentals, and that consulting is bought on trust and reputation. The fundamental is talking to your network, out of curiosity about what people are doing rather than to sell anything.
What does the pattern look like across everyone they have coached?
Across more than a hundred people making this transition, the number one challenge is getting customers. And when the question is how many prospects they met with last month, the answer is some version of not enough. Beautiful sites and struggling pipelines coexist regularly.
Why do people make this move at all?
Mostly not for the money, in their experience. Many of the people who succeed at it do not need it. What comes up instead is contribution, community, purpose and relevance: continuing to be useful, and sharing what they know rather than replacing an income.
What if you have not done fractional or consulting work before?
Jesse's position is that the identity follows the work rather than preceding it. You move into the role, start doing it, and it becomes real. Waiting until you have the experience before claiming it leaves a gap that rarely closes on its own.
But interviewers do ask for that experience.
They do, and one participant with a long enterprise background offered the practical answer: inside a large company you can build it before you leave. Reach out to other executives, help on projects where your specialty speeds up their execution, and you have both the experience and something concrete to point at.
Does the leadership style you had transfer?
If it was development-oriented, yes, and Ron treats that as the natural bridge. If you spent your employed career upskilling people, creating opportunities and getting the best out of them, that is the attitude to bring into a consulting career. The business benefits when its people do a better job and are happier.
Why is it easier to do that as a consultant?
Because the distractions come off the plate, and because you chose the engagement. Ron contrasts it with the feeling as an employee of having lost the ability to choose anything, with other people's decisions dictating his schedule and his life. Choosing the work changes the attitude you bring to it.
What surprised them about the incubator?
That the content was not the draw. They built it expecting tools, templates and playbooks to be the reason people joined, and when they surveyed members after a year the answer had almost nothing to do with the content and everything to do with the community.
Why does community matter for someone going independent?
Because it is lonely, and on the days when a client is hard to find it is easy to give up on yourself when you are alone. A group to share the wins and the setbacks with supplies the spark you need. Their advice is to find one whether or not it is theirs.
What is the one-sentence version?
Leave two years out and on your own terms, work the network you already have rather than the website you do not, and walk in with questions instead of answers.
Terms defined in this episode
- The two-year announcement
- Ron began telling Mitsubishi he intended to leave about two years before he went. It surprised no one, and when the time came there were projects they still wanted him on. That is what turned a departure into a first engagement rather than a closed door.
- Consulting as a trust business
- The observation underneath his whole approach. Both of his first two clients arrived through people who already knew what he was like to work with: his previous employer, and an industry contact who had moved to another company. No website, no advertising, no marketing plan.
- Consultant vs. coach
- Jesse's framing, which Ron works inside. A consultant analyzes the situation and tells you what to do, and may execute part of it for you. A coach asks what you think needs to happen and then asks the questions that lead you to the answer yourself. The consultant does the work; the coach makes it so you can.
- The hired-gun engagement
- The other legitimate shape, and Ron did both. Where a company lacks the specific experience or the bandwidth, you come in, do the work and produce the deliverables. Closing the Mitsubishi acquisition was this. It is a real service and it leaves no capability behind, which is the trade.
- Guided discovery
- Asking rather than telling, so the answer arrives as the client's own. Ron's version starts in his introduction: he is not there because he has the answers, he is there because they have the knowledge, and his job is to facilitate a discussion that turns it into something actionable.
- The chip on the shoulder
- The default posture toward an incoming consultant, which Ron treats as reasonable rather than as an obstacle. Few people want to be told what to do, and plenty of people have watched a consultant arrive with a deck. Saying up front that you are not there with the answers is what lowers it.
- Humility as the operating principle
- His single piece of advice for an executive making this move. The mistake is pushing your expertise at people because it feels like the route to being accepted and re-engaged. Staying open and finding out what they know creates the openings to contribute; leading with what you know sets the wrong tone.
- Who not how
- The principle Ron credits to Dan Sullivan and built his own business plan around. Rather than working out how to do everything yourself, find the person with the expertise and the appetite for it, and bring them into the problem. You still own delivering what the client needs.
- The gig-economy overhead model
- How Ron runs lean. Legal, design, marketing, ad management and marketplace operations all go to freelancers on a project basis rather than to hires. He launched his guitar businesses this way and applies the same approach to consulting, on the grounds that it saves time and keeps overhead near zero.
- The outside-in license
- What a consultant gets that an employee does not. Freedom to be direct, without the political calculation, the long institutional history, or the accumulated positions that shape what an insider can say. Clients expect the fresh perspective, which is a large part of what they are buying.
- The removed overhead
- What comes off the plate along with the job title. People management and the day-to-day obligations of leading inside a large organization consume time and energy without often producing results. Ron reports spending less time on the client than he did in his old business and having more impact.
- The enterprise misconception
- Jesse's warning against pigeonholing yourself into small and midsize work. Enterprises have far more resource to apply to a problem and the work is often about the same size, so the deals come with another zero. Few people have genuine enterprise experience, and the belief that large companies only hire the big firms is a limiting one.
- Identity follows the work
- Jesse's answer to the person waiting until they have the experience before claiming the title. You shift into the role, start doing the work, and the identity arrives afterwards. Waiting for it first leaves a permanent gap between what you think you are and what you are doing.
- The community finding
- What surprised them about the consultant incubator. They built it expecting the tools, templates and playbooks to be the draw. Surveyed after a year, members said it had almost nothing to do with the content and everything to do with the community, because going out alone is lonely and quitting is easy on a bad day.
“A consultant is a person who borrows your watch and charges you to tell you what time it is.”
“That's why I know you're not a consultant.”
“I'm not here because I think I have all the answers for your company. I'm here because I believe you have a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge in your business. My job is to help facilitate a discussion, to extract that knowledge and turn it into something actionable.”
“That automatically takes the chip off their shoulder, because nobody actually really wants to be told what to do.”
“I was approaching him with questions, not with answers. That's more the coaching approach.”
“If you ask for a single good piece of advice: be humble.”
“They scheduled the approval meeting for this acquisition on December twenty-fifth. That was one of those moments where I thought: this company doesn't care about my schedule.”
“I met that goal within five weeks of leaving Mitsubishi.”
“My biggest problem at the moment isn't finding more consulting work. It's throttling back on the opportunities being presented to me.”
“My wife keeps reminding me I didn't retire so I could work more. I retired so I could work less.”
“I'm spending less time working with this company than I spent in the business I was in before, and I feel in many ways I'm having more impact now.”
“Actually, I don't have a website. I haven't done any advertising. What I've done so far has been working my network.”
“Don't underestimate the need for enterprises to get value from your experience. You can generally just add a zero onto the back of the deals.”
“Don't spend your time on the website. Spend it on coffee catch-ups. That's ten times more important to driving business than a perfectly polished site.”
“You shift into the new role, you start doing the work, and then the identity comes to you. It's not the other way around.”
Full transcript
Thirty years, and twelve of them at Mitsubishi
Ron Denoo: I spent more than thirty years as an executive in the chemicals, plastics and composite space. I am actually a mechanical engineer by trade. I did real engineering work for the first four or five years of my career, doing research projects and a lot of process development, and then moved more into the business side.
Over my career I had the opportunity to serve in a number of different roles. I ran global research organizations. I was the CEO of a German plastics company for several years. And I spent the last twelve years of my career working as an executive within Mitsubishi Chemical Group, first within one of their business units, then promoted into a regional role, and ultimately into a global role.
It was a great career. I do not have any complaints. I was very blessed with the opportunities I was given.
A hundred and twenty flights a year
Ron Denoo: But when I reflect back on it, and even during the last years of that career, it was a really difficult way of life. I made a conscious decision not to relocate my family to Japan, and yet my office was in Tokyo. So I was traveling a lot. I was averaging about a hundred and twenty flights a year, working very long days, having meetings at all different hours because of the time zone difference. And I did this for many, many years.
At a certain point I really started to question some of my life choices, and decided life is too short to live this way. I started thinking about off-ramps I could take that would give me a bit more balance, and about finding other ways to spend my time on things that were more important to me than plastics and composites and chemicals.
December twenty-fifth
Ron Denoo: Probably the most important thing for me was figuring out some way to get control over my calendar. I cannot tell you how many important life events I missed because there was some meeting I had to be at in Europe or in Japan.
In those executive roles, particularly in global companies, you have very little control over how you spend your time. You are at the mercy of when somebody decides to set up a meeting or a conference or a trade show somewhere. There is always some event you have no control over impinging on your calendar.
I always remember, I was running an acquisition, because I was in M&A for a while at Mitsubishi, and they scheduled the approval meeting for that acquisition on December twenty-fifth. That was one of those moments where I thought: this company really does not care about my schedule, does not care about my lifestyle. It was pretty frustrating.
The guitars
Ron Denoo: I am a musician and have been my whole life, and I had a passion for guitars. I started a business restoring and reselling vintage Japanese guitars, which began as a way to burn some downtime. When I was in Japan I started hitting all the secondhand guitar shops and flea markets, finding great vintage instruments and bringing them home.
One day my wife said, you have to stop bringing all these guitars home, because you literally have guitars in every room of the house. So I said, okay, maybe I will sell some, because what I really enjoyed was the hunt. I sold fifty the first year and two hundred the year after that, and I thought, there is actually a business model here.
That was about twelve years ago and the business is still going strong. I have turned it over to a partner now, so I am not too involved day to day.
It gave me a sense of something. I enjoyed it. It was work and it brought income, but it was not something I felt was stressful. It was something I really enjoyed doing. So it triggered me to start thinking about how I spend more of my time doing things I actually want to do, rather than things I have to do.
How Demand Metric came into it
Ron Denoo: Part of this was the connection I made with Demand Metric a few years ago. I had signed up for a subscription on their website. At that time I was in a regional role at Mitsubishi, and I had been tasked with putting together market-facing teams across a broad organization of business units that had never actually worked together before.
So I was looking to standardize some tools they would use. How do they look at opportunities, how do they manage their opportunity pipeline, things like that. I reached out to borrow some of the templates they had created, just to save myself time building the tools I needed.
Matt reached out to me and we had a short conversation. I explained the challenge ahead, which was pretty sizable. We had a lot of people whose hearts and minds we had to win over. He suggested a call with Jesse to explore whether they could customize a playbook rather than me just downloading something from the website.
Within an hour of that call it became very apparent to me that these were people who really understood how business worked. It was not what I would call the typical consulting approach. I had worked a lot with McKinsey and with Boston Consulting. These were different. Really hands-on, really practical.
So I engaged them to customize a playbook, and asked Jesse to attend one of the seminars I was running to help facilitate. That first workshop must have been September 2022. It blossomed into a two-year relationship while I was still at Mitsubishi, to help globalize the program. Jesse came on board as my partner, and I put him on an airplane and had him live the crazy life I had been living for a long time. Between the two of us we did dozens of workshops all over the world.
Retiring, and five weeks
Ron Denoo: I finally retired from Mitsubishi Chemical in January of this year. I had started another guitar business a few months prior with a partner, and we are now the fastest-growing guitar brand in the United States. That has gone extremely well, and we are launching another brand this month.
On the consulting side, I had set a goal for myself. When I left Mitsubishi I had a number in mind for how much I wanted to make consulting in a year, and I had worked that into my financial plan.
I met that goal within five weeks of leaving Mitsubishi.
It has been incredible for me personally. My biggest problem at the moment is not finding more consulting work. It is throttling back on the opportunities being presented to me, because I still have my own businesses to run. And my wife keeps reminding me I did not retire so I could work more. I retired so I could work less. So I have to refine that balance.
I feel very blessed with how this year has gone. It is not really what I expected. It is actually much better.
Where the first two clients came from
Jesse Hopps: If you had to give advice on where to look for your first engagement: did you build a website? Did you do a big marketing strategy? Did you spend much time on thought leadership? A lot of people get caught up in thinking they have to do all that in order to get to a great account, and I believe that is just not true.
Ron Denoo: My very first account was Mitsubishi, my previous employer. I had given them lots of notice. I started talking about leaving the company about two years before I actually left, so they were not taken by surprise by any stretch. They knew what my plan was.
But when it finally came time for me to go, there were some things I had been involved in, some projects I was working on, that they felt still needed my attention. And I said, okay, I am happy to continue to support those, but I am going to do it as a consultant, not as an employee. I was working on an acquisition for them, supporting it, and they then asked me to take the lead and close it, which I did in July of this year. That one I did not have to work very hard at.
The next client I landed was an industry connection, somebody I had worked with previously who had gone on to another company in the industry and recognized that they had a lot of the same problems I was involved in solving at Mitsubishi. Once they found out I was leaving and might be available to help, they reached out. They have now become by far my biggest consulting client, and there are a ton of opportunities there. It has been really rewarding, and I feel like we are having impact.
No website, no advertising
A participant: One of the things I have struggled with most is wanting the website to be perfect, because that is the world I come from. I had a marketing department, an advertising department, all these departments that did the work. What have you done in terms of self-promotion, or did everything come to you from your network?
Ron Denoo: Actually, I do not have a website. I have not done any advertising. What I have done so far has been working my network.
The other thing I would say, and this is more of a learning from my guitar business: one of the great things for any entrepreneur these days is the ability to tap into the gig economy and not have to hire a full-time marketing person. You can outsource so much of that, find an expert, hire them for a single engagement, pay them a reasonable amount to do a project, and keep your overhead extremely low.
That is how I launched all of my guitar businesses. I still rely on freelancers all the time, for everything from legal work to design work to marketing to who sets up my ads to how I manage my marketplace sales. It is a piece of advice I would give to any small business person, including a consultant. It saves you a lot of time and a lot of overhead.
Do the fundamentals
Jesse Hopps: I heard on the Huberman podcast that there are a lot of people who love to get deep in the science and the hacks and the intricacies, and they do not want to go to the gym and do the work. It is optimization when you are not doing the fundamentals.
Consulting and coaching are bought through trust. People know your reputation. You can make friends and build new relationships or leverage existing ones. We have all got large networks. If you are not working your network to get curious about what people are doing these days, not because you are trying to sell anything but because you want to be active and see where you can add value, then don't spend your time on the website. Spend it on coffee catch-ups. That is ten times more important to driving business than a perfectly polished site.
Matt: Over the last fifteen years, working with consultants and agencies and people, the number one challenge everybody has is getting customers. I have seen sites that look beautiful where the person is struggling to get deals. And when I ask how many prospects they met with in the last month, the answer is always: not enough.
What changes when you are outside
Jesse Hopps: When you think about what you did for Mitsubishi at the end and what you are doing now, is there a distinction between consulting and coaching and advisory? How do you look at those roles?
Ron Denoo: It is very different in a lot of ways. When you are an employee, you have to worry more about the political impacts of the things you are doing. As a consultant you get an amazing license to shake things up a little, to be very direct and very truthful, in a kind way. They are expecting that you bring an outside-in view that is not tainted by politics, not tainted by long history in the company, and all those other things. You bring a fresh perspective that is very valuable to the client.
In many ways it is more liberating. It is a lot more fun to be doing this from the outside than it was trying to do it from the inside when you had all those other dynamics to worry about.
It is also great not to have to worry about all the people management and everything that a leader in a big organization is saddled with day to day. That burns a lot of time and a lot of energy, and often it does not help with creating results. What we do now, we can focus our time on creating results. So even though I am spending less time working with this company than I spent in the business I was in before, I feel in many ways I am having more impact now than I did before. It is a leverage point that is hard to get inside a big organization.
Two different roles you can play
Jesse Hopps: I want to draw a distinction, because I think it is important. There are two different roles you could play.
The first is a hired-gun role, where there is a skill set or a set of experiences you have and the company does not have the internal capability or the bandwidth. Someone who has run a center of excellence for supply chain knows the ins and outs of standing one up. Another big company doing it from scratch says: we could accelerate our timeline, we just need someone to come in, look at what is going on, tell us what we need to do and give us a road map, because nobody has done it here before. That is a specialized set of knowledge, and often they need you to do the work. You are developing the reports, producing the deliverables.
When Ron took the lead on that M&A transaction, they did not have anyone else who could do the job. They needed a person with that background and that context to get the deal over the line. Very much a consulting role.
Contrast that with the transformation work. I would call that coaching. A consultant analyzes the situation and tells you what to do. Here are the five steps, and they may or may not execute for you. Coaching is asking people what they think they need to do, and then asking questions to guide them to the answers on their own. You do not do the work for them. You guide them into doing the work for themselves. And that is very different from most consulting firms.
The chip on the shoulder
Ron Denoo: You have to be a little careful, because there is a bias in a lot of organizations against consultants. Some of us have probably also been the people who sneer a little when they hear a consultant is being brought in.
So what I do personally, when I engage with a client for the first time, in my introduction, some of the first words out of my mouth: I make it clear that I am not here because I think I have all the answers for your company. I am here because I believe you have a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge in your business, in your products, in your industry. And my job is to help facilitate a discussion, to extract that knowledge and then turn it into something actionable that we can work on to improve the business.
That automatically takes the chip off their shoulder a little, because nobody actually really wants to be told what to do. And I really do believe that most of the time they do know the answers. Usually you are surrounded by expertise in those organizations. They may not know exactly which levers to pull, or exactly which direction to run, or what best practice looks like in certain areas. So you bring some of that expertise, combine it with their in-house knowledge, and partner with them. That is a more coaching-type approach than the traditional consulting approach.
The watch
Ron Denoo: With this big client, I did a one-day workshop with one of the business units. I knew, because I had done a little homework and had some friends in the company, to ask about the business unit leader who was coming. I said, tell me about him, I would like to prepare myself.
And they warned me. They said, this guy is tough. He hates consultants. He never wants to do anything new. Good luck. That is basically what they said. Good luck with this one.
So I showed up, gave my introduction, and told them what I was there to do. It was a full-day workshop and we took a break for lunch. At lunch this business unit leader came up to me and said: you know, Ron, somebody told me once that a consultant is somebody who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is.
And I said, no, no, that is absolutely untrue. A consultant is a person who borrows your watch and charges you to tell you what time it is.
He started laughing. He said, that is why I know you are not a consultant.
That was an important moment for him, and now he has engaged me in additional engagements to support his business unit, because we built that trust. And by the way, I did not find him difficult to work with, or anti-consulting, or anything. I found him quite open-minded. But it was because I was approaching him with questions, not with answers. And that is more the coaching approach.
Be humble
A participant, a chemicals executive who left an operating role the previous year: Like all of us, I have been in the driving seat in an executive position, making hundreds of decisions every day. What would be your best piece of advice for moving from that to a coaching style? What can you tell me to refrain myself from telling people what to do, because I know the answer, of course.
Ron Denoo: If you ask for a single good piece of advice: be humble. I think that is extremely powerful.
A lot of people make the mistake of trying to push their expertise on somebody, because they feel that is how they get accepted, that is how they get the next engagement. That is not my style at all. I prefer to stay humble and stay open to working with people, and to try to understand what they know rather than overwhelm them with what I know.
Naturally, you will have opportunities to share your expertise and your experience. But if you try to lead with that, it sets the wrong tone.
Jesse Hopps: When you do not have the big business card behind you and you are out there developing business for yourself, it is easy to fall in love with your stories, your experience, and what you think the client should do, when you have very limited information about what is actually going on. You do not have a lot of context to form an opinion. So a major driver of success is falling in love with their problem, their challenge, the implications of it, what they have tried already, and staying extremely curious and humble before you make a judgment.
Who not how
A participant, a global supply chain and transformation leader: You said that sometimes you needed support from an expert and reached out to your network. It is not always a one-man show. Sometimes something grows and you think, I can do it, but I had better get an expert to cover that special part, and you still coordinate and stay the point of contact. How did you do that?
Ron Denoo: One of the principles I learned while formulating a plan for my own business is the principle called who, not how. I think it is a Dan Sullivan principle. It means: do not try to do everything yourself. Go find people who have the right expertise, who are passionate about a topic you are not that deep in, and find a way to get them involved in your problem.
In the end you have to deliver what the client needs. Sometimes you will have exactly the right recipe, and sometimes you may not, but you still want to be their problem solver. One of the big benefits of working with the Demand Metric team is that they have a tremendous network and access to experts in different areas. So if I say, I have been working on this commercial academy concept for this client and now they want a similar academy for the supply chain, I am not the person to run a supply chain academy. Do you know somebody? And inevitably they do. We can bring people in on a project basis and give the client what they need. It is a huge advantage.
Say yes more often
Jesse Hopps: Matt and I do a lot of meetings that are not linear. They are not transactional. We are not doing this meeting because we are going to get some goal this second. We take calls, we meet people, we put events on, we try to add value. We do not know it is going to turn into anything.
But when you have an intention and you are paying attention, you have this thing called your reticular activating system, the part of your brain that notices things. If you have ever thought, I want a new red car, you see them everywhere when you did not before.
In this case, I was going to skip this session and leave it to Matt and Ron. But I came. And there is an active situation right now where a client is looking at taking what we are doing in commercial and moving it over to supply chain. So how did I suddenly meet someone who might be the right person? By adding value. By going out and trying to create value for other people.
So do not feel like every meeting needs a direct, immediate, resolved purpose. Sometimes throwing yourself out there and letting things happen is the point. Say yes more often. Get yourself out into the world where you meet more people and have more conversations, and share what your purpose is and what you are up to. The world has a way of making those connections happen.
Why people actually do this
Jesse Hopps: We all have different reasons for getting into this kind of career, especially late stage. And we have learned it is generally not about the money. It is a lot more about contribution, community, purpose, relevance, people. Most of the people we have seen succeed do not need the money.
Ron has made it sound really easy. His employer hired him back, he got an account right away, he hit his goal in five weeks. The truth is we have worked with more than a hundred people trying to make this transition. If you are outstanding as a human being and can add value, the world will value that and you will find work. That is close to a universal truth. But there are things you can do to give yourself a better chance.
Sometimes people only dive into consulting once they have been laid off. Ron contrasts with that. He started positioning his exit two years before it was time to go, and left on a high note, on his own terms. It was not a debate about whether an expensive salary was still needed. It was: we are going to lose him, what is he working on that nobody else here can do? He flipped the power dynamic. This is a forty-billion-dollar company and he is one person. There is a lesson in how he left the organization and how he maintained relationships with people after they moved on.
Identity follows the work
A participant, a former VP of engineering: I have always invested in the companies wherever I have gone. How is the attitude of being a consultant or a coach different? When I have had these discussions, people say: you have not done fractional work before, you have to have that experience. But you have to learn what it is before you can claim the experience.
Ron Denoo: One of the things I did during my employed career was spend a lot of time developing people. That was important to me personally. It was a responsibility I felt and something I enjoyed. If that is the kind of leader you are, that is the attitude you want to carry into a consulting career: figuring out how you actually help the people. Ultimately the business benefits if the people are doing a better job and are happier.
And there are a lot of distractions that get removed from your plate when you enter as a consultant rather than as an employee, which lets you focus more intently on that goal. It is also easier when you have a lot more freedom. I was now choosing these engagements. As an employee I really felt I had lost the ability to choose anything, with other people making decisions that dictated my life and my schedule. So it gives you a more positive attitude, because it is something you are choosing to do rather than being told to do.
Jesse Hopps: On needing the experience before claiming the identity: a big part of the coaching we do is about not putting limiting beliefs on yourself. You shift into the new role, you start doing the work, and then the identity comes to you. It is not the other way around. If you are always waiting until you have a certain thing, there will always be a gap between what you think you are and what you are actually doing.
A participant with a long enterprise background: I would add one thing. If you are in a large corporate organization, whether or not it is called a fractional role, you can reach out to other executives. That is how I got into this concept first. I had a conversation with my group president and reached out to other executives, helping on projects where my specialty could speed up their execution. Being able to say you did that while holding a full-time job will definitely help. It helped me.
What people actually joined for
Jesse Hopps: If you are going to go out on your own as a coach or a consultant, it can be lonely. On the days when it is hard to find a client, it is easy to give up on yourself if you are by yourself. But if you are with a group and can share your experiences and learn from others, it often gives you that spark, that bit of motivation and encouragement you need.
When we built the program we thought our tools and templates and playbooks were going to be the main draw, and why people would sign up. When we surveyed everyone after about a year of doing it, shockingly to us, it had nothing to do with our content. It was everything to do with the sense of community people were getting.
So do not underestimate that. Regardless of whether you work with us, if you are going to go out and do this, find some people you can have as part of your community to support you. It is invaluable.
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